Messing with the Fourth Dimension

Leave it to Faulkner to manipulate yet another dimension for his reader. Not even time is sacred. His weird obsession with time is apparent in the Quentin section of The Sound and the Fury. The ticking of the watch, the continual reference to gears, the statement that Death has no sister followed by the equally powerful statement that neither does time therefore equating time with death. He does it all the time! It’s an endless collage of time imagery, ticking, gears and the constant awareness that time is short. It makes the reader feel it too, the ticking away of their own breath and their own sense of time being stripped away. It’s rather unsettling. After Quentin you think that you’ll never have to feel that weird manipulation of time ever again, but of course, you would be wrong.

            As I Lay Dying is just as stressful. Time drags in this novel. It’s as though Faulkner has sucked the reader into this miserable ride along with the Bundrens, to trudge through all of this ordeal with them. Time seems to drag, reading the novel starts to feel like running through molasses- painfully slow.

            Faulkner seems to have a fascination with the passage of time and individual perspective on the reality (or lack thereof) of time. It isn’t really measured by the ticking of a watch in your pocket, because if that were true you wouldn’t feel like you had aged fifty years trying to get through the Bundren family trip to bury Ma. Faulkner truly does take the perspective of chronology and bend it, bringing the reader to question the nature and reality of time itself.